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Monday, December 17, 2012

Gang Busters (General Teleradio, 1955)

The night before last Charles and I had watched a quite
different sort of movie: Gang Busters, a
1955 release from General Teleradio (a branch of General Tire that got into
producing TV shows and later that year bought the RKO studio from Howard Hughes,
only to sell it three years later to Desi Arnaz and Lucille Ball for their
Desilu company) based on a popular radio show by Phillips H. Lord that General
Teleradio had already transferred to TV. (A search for Gang Busters on archive.org revealed none of the radio episodes
but 10 of the TV shows and a 13-episode Universal serial from 1942.) According
to an imdb.com “Trivia” poster, this film was actually edited together from
three of the TV episodes from 1952, but the plot, though a bit episodic, holds
together well. It’s a nervy gangster story centered around criminal John Omar
Pinson (Myron Healey), who works in Oregon and repeatedly gets caught and
sentence to Oregon State Penitentiary, only he manages to escape just about
every time he’s sent there. While he’s in prison he assembles a gang including
Slug Bennett (Frank Richards), Mike Denike (Rusty Wescoatt), Louie Feth
(William Justine) and Larry Ogilvie (Allan Ray). He also attracts the seemingly
homoerotic attentions of Wayne Long (Sam Edwards), a milquetoast robber who
wants Pinson to show him the ropes so that when he is released he’ll be a
better criminal. The nervy relationship between Pinson and Long is one of the
weirdest Gay-themed plots in the Production Code era (rivaling the similarly quirky
tie between Lawrence Tierney and Elisha Cook, Jr. in the otherwise useless Born
to Kill); while they’re in prison together
Long is constantly cruising Pinson (there’s no other word for it, really) and
Pinson couldn’t be less interested in him, criminally or sexually.

Once they’re
out Long blows one of Pinson’s attempts to flee the cops and Pinson is finally
caught — we’re supposed to assume for good even though we’ve seen him escape so
much one expects him to boast, “No prison can hold me!” Long even made one of his previous escapes
possible by slipping him a hacksaw blade through which to saw through the bars
of the cell in which he’s been put in solitary. The film was written and
directed by Bill Karn, who used two
narrators — Phillips H. Lord in his accustomed third-person role and Don C.
Harvey playing the lead police detective out to capture Pinson — which
occasionally got stentorian and almost insulting to the intelligence (one
expects a movie to show us things
rather than hearing an unseen — or, in the first reel at least, seen — voice telling us what’s supposed to be going on), but the film itself is
fast-moving, exciting and full of intriguing devices (like Pinson’s way of
tying a gun into his palm so he can go about without anyone suspecting he’s
armed). Its debt to the 1949 James Cagney vehicle White Heat is pretty obvious — the unscrupulous and crafty
super-criminal, the attempt to infiltrate an undercover cop in his cell, even a
detail like the shoebox-sized mobile phone with which the police try to stay in
touch with each other as they track him down — but the 1955 Gang
Busters emerges as a surprisingly good
movie, effective and entertaining, powered by a marvelously matter-of-fact
performance by Myron Healey. Whereas Cagney in White Heat turned out the bravura gangster performance to end
all bravura gangster performances, Healey in a similar role here is coolly
understated, a man who became a criminal not because of some weird family
dynamic or out of desperation to feed his family but simply because he wanted to, as if he did an assessment of his employable
skills and decided crime was the career for which he was most suited.